A long time ago, I had to write SQL parsers (for 3 of the most popular DBs at the time). It is a surprisingly difficult language to parse and disambiguate - particularly when having to deal with the warts of its variants. Sure it's not quite C++ but it's was easily the most annoying parser work I ever had to do. And in my experience, the trickier it is to parse a particular language, the more difficult it is to provide feedback to users in the form of helpful parse errors.
This is true, but the observation is still salient. There does seem to be some correspondence between languages with inherent friction and parsers that aren’t interested in being helpful. E.g. sometimes a user base just collectively decides they’re ok with some level of pain.
Only ~15% of power in the US comes from coal currently, and it continues to decline as each of the last remaining coal generators are retired. Politics props it up, but it will eventually be gone. Five years maybe, ten years tops. Focus on forward looking tipping points for step change death spiral progress (when minimum coal mining, transportation, and generation minimum limits are breached).
Coal doesn't even compete with just solar, those aren't your two options.
Coal competes with literally everything else, and it loses to every single one of them. It's a terrible, terrible fuel. Burn natgas instead and you're already magnitudes better off.
Coal only exists today in the US because our politics is broken beyond belief.
Thankfully this is one of the easiest limitations to get around technically. Grid forming inverters and inertia markets make this pretty straightforward to solve IMO. Storage is the key thing we need to solve
To throw another in the mix, SendCutSend has consistently been a reliable and affordable option for 2D cut parts. They recently added CNC machining offerings, though I can't speak to their affordability on that.
Overseas will almost always win on price (at least in small quantities), but it's hard to beat the turnaround from local manufacturers...
> Overseas will almost always win on price (at least in small quantities), but it's hard to beat the turnaround from local manufacturers...
Overseas can work with crazy turnarounds too. Once I ordered a bunch of stuff from Digikey, and the parcel came around from the tiny village of Thief River Falls MN to rural Bavaria in less than 30 hours, picking/handling included. And free shipping, despite being less than 100€ in volume.
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